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Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem presents the main results of the Eurogroup meeting, 16 June 2016

Good
evening and welcome to this press conference. During our meeting we heard the
sad news of the passing away of Mrs Jo Cox in the United Kingdom, and we
observed a moment of silence in our meeting out of respect for her. Our thoughts
are with her loved ones and all those who were touched by her life and political
work for the UK. The United Kingdom is a beacon for peaceful politics and we
hope that the British public, the people of the UK, can make their democratic
choices serenely and in a safe way next week.

Today we've welcomed
Christine Lagarde, who presented the article IV review of the euro zone. The IMF
sees the euro area cyclical recovery on track, despite turbulence in the global
economy. This good news follows on from the achievements of the euro area in
recent years including rebalancing and reforms at national level and
strengthening of institutions throughout the eurozone, for the eurozone. We have
built a banking union, set up new institutions, created a single rulebook, the
SSM and the SRB, all of which are all up and running. And the work will continue
on the strengthening of our banking system. Structural reforms remain high on
our agenda and will continue to be discussed in depth in the Eurogroup, and it
will also be on the agenda of tomorrow's Ecofin in the context of the European
Semester and the country specific recommendations.

At the same time, we
concurred with IMF that we need to make our economies more resilient, certainly
viewing any future economic shocks that may occur. This means using the
opportunities that we have at the moment, for example low interest rates, trying
to address budgetary issues, starting to reduce deleveraging and reducing debt
levels throughout the eurozone. It also means continued work on the banking
union, reforming our economies to make them more flexible, to help them adjust
faster.

The Fund has provided us with number of recommendations and ideas
on how we can support growth further at the European level, including fiscal
policies and structural policies, and we will continue to work on that. One of
the ways we do that is by discussing in depth structural reforms, the design,
the principles and the benchmarks for reforms, which is something that is on the
agenda of the Eurogroup on the regular basis.

Today specifically, we
discussed common principles for pension reforms in the Eurogroup, one of our
regular thematic discussions. We have designed four common principles, which
will improve the effectiveness of pension reforms (the statement will be
provided to you on those principles), making our pension systems more
sustainable, safeguarded against demographic and macroeconomic risks, but also
designing flanking policies to extend the working lives of people and to boost
retirement incomes.

We will periodically in the Eurogroup monitor
developments in this field, the way we've done on other issues of structural
reforms, and return to those, creating benchmarks for our work on structural
reforms.

Also today we discussed, as we do on a regular basis, inflation
and exchange rate developments, and we agreed with the Commission and the ECB's
assessment of recent development in this area. We noted that the IMF also
considers that the ECB's comprehensive package of measures is yielding positive
effects. Inflation rates are expected to pick up later this year and increase
further gradually in 2017. Now let me first give the floor to Christine, who
would like to brief us further on their work on the eurozone

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